Isabella Weber

Isabella M. Weber (born 1987 in Nuremberg, Germany ) is a German economist. She is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Weber is known for having taken a position in favor of a price control policy. Her article published in The Guardian in December 2021 caused an uproar among economists.

Life
In 2017, Weber obtained a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her thesis was titled China's Escape from the 'Big-Bang': The 1980s Price Reform Debate in Historical Perspective and advised by Peter Nolan.

From 2017 to 2019, Weber was a lecturer in Economics at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2019, she became assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

In December 2021, an op-ed she published in The Guardian which argued that strategic price controls could help control inflation in bottleneck situations was heavily criticized by economists, making her "the most hated woman in economics" (The New Yorker). Paul Krugman called her op-ed "truly stupid", a statement for which he later apologized.

In 2022-23, Weber was a fellow in the Future of Capitalism program at the Berggruen Institute.

In 2022, Weber was a member of the German government's gas price commission, an expert advisory group of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

Awards and honors

 * In 2023, Weber was recognized on Time Magazine's TIME100 Next list which recognizes rising leaders across multiple fields
 * In 2019, Weber was awarded the Joan Robinson Prize from the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy for her book “How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate”
 * In 2019, Weber was also awarded the Warren Samuels Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in History of Economic Thought and Methodology